S1E4 — McKinseyGate: When Coding Time Becomes a Proxy for Value
That's enough that's enough seconds, I guess, right there. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to talking about people, technology, culture, and everything in between. We have quite the potentially contentious episode for you. Nevertheless, because we have to explain where we've been, meanwhile. Mhmm.
Duena:And we also wanna talk to you about something that's quite a topic du jour in the tech community. Hopefully, it is, which is the, in my opinion, insane report from McKinsey on how
Dave:Oh, actually naming them.
Duena:One should oh, yes. I've already done so on many other podcasts. Why not my own? Yeah. What did it?
Dave:Maybe our pockets aren't quite as deep.
Duena:Maybe our pockets are not as deep as all the other podcasts I've said this time? Yeah. I have to say it on LinkedIn. I'm happy to say it on on on on vision. What seems to be the problem?
Duena:Please walk me through this. I'm ADHD, and I can't be more No
Dave:problem. Let's just
Duena:I'm dead serious. Is there is there a lot of a critic of an enterprise in general without it being considered malicious and without it being
Dave:I think so. Yeah. And we're allowed to pick apart articles and give our opinion on articles regardless where they come from.
Duena:Well, I would hope so. So, yes, I have no I'm not going to be holding any barrels. I I know you're finding funny because quite frankly, I've had quite another brush with this particular consultant in the past, and it didn't turn out great for me or my relationship with Forbes Mhmm. In short. But I don't want to brush with anyone.
Duena:I wish I didn't have to point this out, but we'll get that in There's
Dave:a lot of. Let's crack on.
Duena:Should they maybe tell people where the hell we've been? Because we said we have an episode four. We haven't cut. We're gonna be talking to other couples. We did
Dave:intend to call pastries out on holiday. Unfortunately, we found that the Wi Fi at the property was literally nonexistent. Four g, stroke, five g black hole worked for a little while, and then the phone started overheating in the 40 degree heat. Bit of an echoey boom.
Duena:I don't want anyone to
Dave:be wearing
Duena:one phone.
Dave:The scenery would have been stunning. Maybe we just need to
Duena:one phone. We were in full on creator somewheres mode. We had about six devices between all of us. So it has been tried on multiple pieces of technology. I don't you're having this developers in the corner thing, but we were going ahead social media style and still weren't able to be using any of the devices.
Duena:When you have no WiFi, you have nothing in life.
Dave:Social media content creators are more productive and devoted.
Duena:I never I never contended any such insanity. Thank you very much.
Dave:That's a bit easy.
Duena:That did not seem so at all. Let me see if I have a transition clapping one, cheering from role. From role.
Dave:There's no point in that.
Duena:It is playing. You just can't hear it. So this is an interesting point, isn't it? What is at play that we can't even see? So what's the topic that we wanna sync up this in quite live?
Duena:Because quite frankly, let let's let's let's update people. Let's be honest. This has popped on our radar last week when it came out. Right? Everyone almost everyone in the tech community has seen it at the same time.
Duena:Right? It's all evolving kind of flabbergasted looking at this report that looked quite from 1992. And for a while, we kind of dismissed it, and we thought, surely, we're not going take this seriously. But then we had quite quickly some voices in technology look at the the meat of it and then become immediately abhorred by quite the same things. And I think most of us independently came to the same reaction separately over the last few days, which is that the existence of this piece of writing from McKinsey as an as an indication that it's okay to be measuring developers under this terminology and with the assumptions they have in place regarding what is coding versus noncoding time is an absolute abomination.
Duena:And one that I would say is can be criminal because, quite frankly, at the in a day and age where mental health is so precarious and we have such crisis that we are throwing things out there that are potentially problematic is scary. We should all be wary. Right?
Dave:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you consider who's McKinsey's audience are.
Duena:Right. That's exactly it.
Dave:Exactly. Right? So but you have to admit from CEO point of view, picked CEO out. You've got 2,000 employees roughly split between, say, sales, marketing, and engineering.
Duena:I don't wanna hear it. If you have are making any kind of technology as a CEO and you are not a tech person, you should be ashamed of yourself. I I don't think that's even contentious. If you are a technology company and you are a nontechnology minded CEO, which is my point of with the the piece of writing we're gonna Yeah.
Dave:But think in less seconds. But which which company is not making some form of software somewhere in the corner?
Duena:No. No. Very different from it being your core to do. Yeah? If you consider yourself a technology company, you must have a technology visionary at your helmet.
Duena:At the very minimum, someone who is a technologist at heart and gets bloody architecture, latest trends, what learning means, how to move people, and how to be an illustration leader at the same time. You cannot be. We have to start eliminating these allowances. It cannot be okay otherwise.
Dave:So the head of Budweiser, for instance, doesn't need to know about tech, although they may be producing some tech down the.
Duena:I didn't say they shouldn't. I said it should be an absolute mandatory requirement for technology companies. But carry on. Let's presume none of these exist. You're just wrong.
Dave:Alright. Okay. So So assumption, an assertion, is that CEOs need to measure what their staff are doing. Excellent. See how
Duena:They're in luck. They happen to be talking about this one department where what the hell their staff is doing is super bloody evident. Not like all the other places where they get to be thinking or creating or not quite sure on what their end measurement is. Is. In this particular place, you can tell what their staff are doing.
Duena:Let me tell you what the disconnect is. The disconnect is not how is my staff doing. Because if you're gonna measure your developer true value, you only need to measure one thing Mhmm. In my opinion. You can only genuinely measure developer value.
Duena:And I know I'm saying this potentially live because we're too lazy to edit anything else. Mhmm. And you look terrified. Like, what the hell is gonna say? God.
Duena:That's That's your your normal your normal face.
Dave:That happens over EastEnders and Coronation Street.
Duena:Right. So and speaking of which, let's come back to humor in the technology space and in the workplace because I'm up and down about everything. I'm not gonna let anyone get away with things, including the technology realm. And so I need to bring people to the drawing board and allow some more of the attack some more of the ridiculousness around this. Anyways, back to attacking this particular one.
Duena:What were we saying?
Dave:McKinsey.
Duena:McKinsey. No. No McKinsey. It's not about McKinsey at all. I want this to be clear.
Duena:Right?
Dave:Are we being as efficient as we can do all the way through the org?
Duena:Right. It's not even about that. It's about if we are measuring if our measurement is value, then the only value that this is what I was saying. That was a contentious sentence I was going to produce. It's in my view, as a non tech person.
Duena:Mhmm. Although I believe I'm a technologist at heart. And and I think maybe once Tracy herself Tracy Baron herself has ordered me that, so I'll I'll take that. I'm also is it a AM AMFR? AMFR?
Duena:Mhmm. I'm sure Brian would be upset if we got this wrong, but I know I am a well HR framework certified very certified person. Anyways, I'll get you the report. I'm sad. I am I know I'm sad.
Duena:That's for sure. And I'm sad. MF AF as well because then you get an accredited fellowship. I think I am accredited fellow of SAD MF. We can put the link down.
Duena:Please, everyone, become that. If you're listening to this and enjoying any of it or agreeing with any of it, go to Brian Finster's SAD MF qualification page and just enroll. Get yourself a T shirt, get everyone in the department enrolled. But outside of that, yeah, and that alone is fitting into it because when we're really honest, when we're really Mhmm. Cynical, when we're really for real, Who are we talking to?
Duena:Right? I think that's kind of what it ends up with. And we this this report is is is at a very minimum worsening of them versus us set of understanding of the world of technology, which in my view is indefensible in this day and age because the only value that you can measure in software development is customer satisfaction. Yeah. It's how much do your people that buy from you love you.
Duena:That is your real measurement. Yeah. And let me tell you how many companies measure that.
Dave:None. None, probably. Zero. But even if they did measure it, let let me just put on devil's advocate hat. Right?
Dave:We've now got one product out there, which is making our customers very, very happy. Me seeing it as a CEO saying, look. If I start whipping these over there, we'll look at one and a half products.
Duena:No. Because because the people that have gotten far enough to be making these things are not stupid enough to think that you can whip any of them into anything. I wonder if this thing has been growing, clapping meanwhile, and complete the sort of conversation of the absolute. Decided to leave it like that.
Dave:You think you just got stomped running underneath the
Duena:Not even like it was drum roll or something because like that. The last thing we used by mistake was cheering or been cheering in the background. We you you guys, if you don't see the video of this, you won't understand that we're attempting to work a little bit of the background of the producer, a bit of Riverside. For no other reason, then we're not capable of admitting. We're not as good of professionals as some of the more junior people in our team.
Duena:Anyhow, where we are may have left you with very little in the way of audio. We apologize if so. But back to it. Value is how delighted is your paying end consumer. I don't know what that beep was.
Duena:I'm hoping it's nothing bad.
Dave:That was the email.
Duena:Okay. I feel that's the only value. Everything else is absolute and complete. Machiavellian measurements don't mean anything. Right.
Duena:Right?
Dave:Yeah. But that CEO is still thinking those 500 people.
Duena:We're gonna have to pause you guys because, believe it or not, we know that Oh, we'll get him back in just a second. You know what? I can cover this while he's not here. Let me just say, to me by the way, this is one of the advice from, I think, the Atlassian is it the Atlassian's here or someone else who was saying kind of very basic beginning of of a pandemic. If someone shows up at the door, don't try to empty it out.
Duena:Just end it in. Get it in. Because, yes, I mean, we we have a male by the door who doesn't every five seconds. Right? And our kid had to tell us because they're still on vacation.
Duena:Who who doesn't have that? And so the good advice was humanize it. Get it in. Integrate it. Don't pretend it's not happening.
Duena:And I think in our case, it's probably the best way to do it because I wouldn't know how to post his side anyhow. So here he is. He's back. He's alive. And I have to tell you with how we should humanize.
Dave:And that shows just how invaluable I am to this team.
Duena:No. I think it shows that we could only acquire a holding pattern, and this moved in value, none at all. Right. It would only show how valuable you are to this team if we were able to somehow measure if our listeners enjoy me versus you more. But let me tell you what that would also show us, that we are not a team, that we are two individual contributors, that we are measuring on an in stale metric.
Dave:No. Because it's not about who enjoys who more. Right. It's about who enjoys the whole. Right?
Duena:Who learns something from the whole, who moves the bed. It's
Dave:But if we tried harder, we're all gonna do one podcast a week. We could do two. Get mister CEO. We could just do 50 a week if we wanted to.
Duena:But who's gonna listen to 50? Who's gonna listen to 50 if I I could. Told you we could do a work TV, and we could be on and on.
Dave:Yeah. But that's what mister CEO might be thinking.
Duena:That we could be doing this all the time. Yeah? No. No.
Dave:No. If we own an engineering department and all we're doing is churning out podcasts, alright, let's say products which makes people happier. How can you whip us to do two pod two podcasts a week? How do we assume no we're doing we are working
Duena:Because it can't whip us. There is no way to whip us is the truth of it. If we don't feel a burning need to add a third podcast or a fourth or a fifth in our insane case
Dave:You're taking the analogy.
Duena:I am. I I you're not taking my response analogy, which is you cannot, mister CEO, whip anyone into anything. You have to make them burn for the need of producing more for you.
Dave:Right. I am taking it. You are giving it. I'm taking it. That's not this is starting to sound porn again for no reason, absolutely.
Dave:Right.
Duena:But we get to do that. No. I get
Dave:to know this is exceptional. No. People don't get
Duena:to do that at the radio, like, have slice slightly flirty banter or online because they work with each other. We have no HR, so you can't complain to anyone. So I just keep flirting with you, telling you I'm gonna break your nose. Who knows what else? Right?
Dave:I know. I can I can complain outside to the great outdoors, but who's listening really? And I can slut silently scream into a pillow.
Duena:Yes. Okay.
Dave:Let's not let's not
Duena:presume that this intermittent wouldn't have happened. Let's presume
Dave:Back to McKinsey. Right. Right. Right. So, I mean, some of the stuff in here is okay.
Dave:Common sense.
Duena:You're not here to just play devil's advocate. That isn't the only thing. Right? So give me one example of something that is common sense or of any value in there.
Dave:Well, no. I mean, even looking at their assertion of exhibit two, which is the inner loop of developer time, which, get this, contains build code tests where they want to spend 70% of the developer's time. I can see you sign already.
Duena:I'm gonna let
Dave:you And the outer loop is things we don't particularly want them doing, which is apparently deploying a scale.
Duena:They we don't want them to do it.
Dave:But that's DevOps. No. It should just be done automatically. Someone else should
Duena:do it. Some some a DevOps manager should do that.
Dave:No. No manager. No no human should be involved in deploying.
Duena:Are you telling me or or McKinsey? Because I'm telling you Anyone. Hello. I'm telling you McKinsey is telling the CEO. Yeah?
Duena:Yeah. Yeah. So what you want your people to work on is these three activities. At least 70% of the time, they need to be doing this. The other 30% of the time, they'd be they will be engaging in what we should call activities.
Duena:Noncoding Yeah. Activities. The outer layer are noncoding activities, which are deployment activities. Whatever the fuck they are, we don't want them, mister CEO. When you catch your people do deployment activities, you get upset.
Dave:Yeah. Because well, look. First off, you're wasting time. Second off, you got humans involved. And third off, you're gonna be able miss a cock up.
Duena:So many conversations into when would the handover should be between devs and and ops. Right? Let's not go into that now, but just the fact okay. What else is the noncoding?
Dave:Yeah. There you go. Hello.
Duena:Actual recording is higher quality. Like he says, it it informed me all of a sudden that it has stopped recording because I have what they named a hardware limitation. And would I desire to open this from a more perform better performing computer or their app, which incidentally only works for, like, a certain type of company. But why would Riverside want me to ditch my Mac in favor of from inferior system? Inferior.
Duena:It should be an inferior system. I'll show in the media. Anyways, where were we?
Dave:What?
Duena:What were we saying? So we I don't think we can measure end value, but let's scroll back. What are they saying they're measuring? Inner loop, outer loop. That's where we left it.
Duena:Right? Yeah. Outer loop being nonessential. What else is nonessential? One of them is deployment activities.
Duena:Any integration?
Dave:Any integration?
Duena:Anything to do with writing an API layer? Anything to do I don't know. I'm asking. Is that what they mean?
Dave:I would take that as integrating things together. So even just integrating branches together.
Duena:So your code with your code and trying to put things into a
Dave:Yeah. At what time.
Duena:So I'm sorry. But who should be making that? What magical pipe can speed that for you if they don't know what you wanted to put with what? I don't know. Isn't that the whole point?
Duena:Isn't that when you're starting
Dave:They don't they don't expand on what they mean as integration.
Duena:What else are they doing that's noncoding?
Dave:Well, the the very contentious one. Meetings.
Duena:Fuck it. They met again, did they? Are they trying to meet with each other, or who are they trying to meet with?
Dave:I don't know. It doesn't say just meetings, generally.
Duena:Just all meetings should be
Dave:meetings are in the thing
Duena:But by default, this is correct. If your definition is coding time, typing of code time
Dave:Yeah.
Duena:Anything outside of it, including meeting with yourself in the mirror Yeah.
Dave:Is wasting time. For that inner loop, the big 90% of that inner loop? Thank you.
Duena:No. Yes. Stop saying that.
Dave:No. Even if the inner loop is what 70% of developers are doing of build code test, build code test, build code test
Duena:You don't wanna be guiding notes, sir.
Dave:You don't wanna build code test. You wanna build code test. Build code test. You wanna think think
Duena:No. No. I think you've gotten it wrong. Code. No.
Duena:No. No. No. I think you're getting it wrong. And no.
Duena:No. This is not how it works. Even I know this. If you are a worthwhile developer, you type and you type good quality top percentile code at all times. And when you test it, you know it works, and it's magical.
Duena:That's how it works. If you sit around and think about it and you're kinda slow coming up with good code, you're probably just not a very efficient developer is what. He's like, are we doing Brian and Diaries' technology? We are. Mean,
Dave:How high is your sarcasm meter being raised on that one?
Duena:I just I just presume that this is what McKinsey is attempting to tell CEOs. I don't
Dave:McKinsey is attempting to sell CEOs.
Duena:No. This is what they are telling CEOs. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Duena:Yeah.
Dave:Yeah. If you're not bash, bash, bash, bash, bash, bash, bash.
Duena:They are wrong. Yeah. They're they're wasting your time.
Dave:That's why I'm sorry. The biggest thing they've missed on the Internet is thinking time.
Duena:Okay. Let me be myself. Right?
Dave:Right.
Duena:The illusion of full time occupancy of a resource is a tempting one as a paying acquirer of that resource. Right. Yeah. I've I've over my lifetime for my since been buying multiple people and paid some people to subsist in their lifetime. It's hard.
Duena:Mhmm. No one will ever go as hard as the top person because they don't have ownership, supposing. That quickly dissipates as soon as that company grows into, you know, an over scale up stage where that vision might disappear. Your your human network will flood in with it, your tech that will flood in. And when you end up there, we kind of start forgetting it becomes a them versus us, and there's so much in there toxicity that it doesn't matter anymore.
Duena:But at this level that I'm talking about, whenever you have direct view of your of your ROI or of your it sounds horrible, but I want I'm talking to the same people. I remember them from the eighties and the nineties. If your ROI is conditional on occupancy of your workers in your mind, then indeed anyone working, like I said, on a podcast to the fridge to grab another cheese, slice as mister Johnson said, is wasting your time. Anyone that thinks is wasting your time. Anyone that creates is wasting your time.
Duena:Anyone that's flexible is wasting your time. Anyone that's talking to anybody else is wasting your time. And most importantly, anyone that isn't continuously typing is wasting your time, and it costs you money. So you wanna know what am I getting out of it. But here's here's what I put it to you is we failed these people, and we continue failing them.
Duena:And McKinsey is failing them even worse because Mhmm. If you are that middle manager that doesn't understand themselves, that that's not true. None of that is true. And when you you can only utilize people at their best for a certain fraction of time. Yeah.
Duena:Science says ninety minutes, a hundred and twenty at a time, whatever it is. I don't care. One day a week, one day a month, ten minutes a year. But those ten minutes are so full of brightness and and and and gold Yeah. That they will save your enterprise.
Duena:I will very gladly pay for this person for a year. Would I rather they didn't lie to me for a year that they are busy for the ten minutes, and I would just pay them for the ten minutes the full 150 k? Of course. But we have dropped the value of knowledge. And in the software industry, it's coming to bite you first.
Duena:You are now incapable of showing this is a bigger topic. You, as the software industry, are incapable of showing, you are not paying me for hours of coding, genius. You are paying me for the incredible thought that goes into this, my incredible inability of relating to other human beings in a social way that I've had to overcome. You are paying me for getting through life in a in a remote position that you hate, and I can hear your organization screeching at me. Yeah.
Duena:You're paying me for all these things, for my human work and for my intelligence and for my EQ and very little bit for my coding. Yeah. If you're paying me very lit very much and only for my coding, we cannot work together. So I expect the tech industry to have gone, no. It's not like that.
Duena:I'm doing a lot more around here. You don't get to measure me on how many times I keep those strokes. So I'm hoping that this is the reaction we're seeing from from the software industry. But so, again, we're McKinsey is failing here two two layers, both layers, in my opinion. We are all failing our leadership and our management by having allowed them to have gotten so far from understanding the essence of how we make technology, all of us.
Duena:Anyone who gets agile, anyone who gets, you know, come and say
Dave:When you say them, who are we talking about?
Duena:When we say them, that we have done what with? Which them? What do
Dave:we No. So develop the community has allowed them to get away from
Duena:whatever The the leaders. Right. Everyone. The CEO, the CXO, the chief HR officer, the CTO, the CIO, whoever is in charge of making the human that's smaller and none of this shit, sorry for the French, sipping in. Yeah?
Duena:Whoever is in charge of never buying a a bloody deck that contains outer layer of noncoding time is all the shit that you should be paying people for, buying people a castle for, and and shaking their hands. Because we were saying offline earlier, what what what what's happening here, what really burns my my my my my goat is my goat is not on fire. I don't know what's burned. My bum? I don't know what it is, but I'm what gets me on fire here
Dave:is That's your goat is
Duena:Get my goat.
Dave:You you just
Duena:Get my goat. You're Fire.
Dave:Taken those two phrases and landed me.
Duena:So what gets my goat on fire is is how is my goat is like
Dave:is Yeah. Poor goat.
Duena:I cannot even tell you. My goat is on fire because, one, we we, the industry, ourselves, community, the developers, the DevOps people who get it, culture people, whoever, the the human work advocates who have failed have failed management. Let them be in this bubble of, yeah, let's pretend it's all okay and your tailor is works and your departments are just great when we know it's a lie. And in technology, everything is different. And the way we work is completely different.
Duena:And what we need out of people is completely different. And the people we are putting through this happen to be the people who need most protection from us in the enterprise and who should have been the nicest too because they are fragile sometimes, because they are in need of things sometimes. And just because they don't tell us, so it doesn't mean that they don't need them. And this is the people that finally I'm I'm most on on fire go to us with are being whacked over the head with this ridiculousness. This is where it becomes irresponsible because people will off themselves when we start checking how many keystrokes they write in code.
Duena:And we have taken 10 steps behind in software development as an as a discipline in general if we allow anyone to think that the value of a developer is in how many things they've wrote. I need all of us to
Dave:get the value in Leonardo da Vinci is how many brush strokes he put into creating a manual.
Duena:Of course. Just a question of how many works.
Dave:If he done more strokes, it'll be more valuable.
Duena:More valuable. I I'm telling you, take it from someone with 600 articles, doesn't work like that. It doesn't. The value is very much intangible many many times. But as long as I have the impact that I know of and I do, as long as I have a purpose that I know of and I do, as long as I'm clear and I have structure and clarity, and as long as I have a team in which I have psychological safety, I can fly fast enough that that doesn't matter.
Duena:Right? Yeah. Why isn't this a common common sense thing? Where are you versus Aristotle principles? Because let me tell you, what you're insisting on doing now is not gonna stratify any of that.
Dave:No. No. No. No.
Duena:Maybe maybe this is a good point. How do you feel about the fact that Aristotle's principle calls for or has found that high performing teams have dependability? What is the relationship between dependability? And we've talked about this multiple times before, dependability, productivity, and performance. I know you have a strong opinion on that, so I'll shut up for a second and breathe.
Dave:Where does Aristotle come into the productivity?
Duena:How do you feel what's dependability versus productivity versus performance? What do we want when we say dependability in the Aristotle score and in general in software development? What's dependability? I kind of is it
Dave:Reliability? Is it right. So reliability of different scales of time taken to do points, whatever you decided points are, quality of code, and maybe quality is more accurate to the product's need.
Duena:Is it is quality really involved in dependability? Can you not be dependable
Dave:Yeah. I mean, if you're dependent upon the team, I think quality has to be a measure of this somewhere.
Duena:Well, I don't believe so. I think you you you you derive quality from the other attributes in the in the Aristotle. So for anyone listening to this who doesn't know quality? Let's just take it a step back for one second. For anyone listening to this who doesn't know, although we don't believe there are many people in that situation, there has been a super valuable massive study in the world of work a few years ago.
Duena:It has been obviously executed by Google who between Google and and Microsoft really and Amazon, in my view, they are the the ones that are carrying big cultural moves. That that's maybe a discussion for another episode since now we are naming names. I'm not holding back. But what Google has done first is try and figure out what makes our people super high performing and what makes our both our leaders super high performing. There is an equivalent study called project oxygen that I encourage you to read.
Duena:Some of those leadership teams are very common sense. They hold hold on for today, but nobody cares really. And then there is an equivalent study called project that is total for teams. And in this one, about 50,000 people have been, if I'm not wrong, interviewed and hundreds of teams, and the dataset was massive. And what has been asked was, what is it that makes these teams truly and genuinely high performing for Google?
Duena:And, again, in this massive set of data they have tried to go through, is it performance reviews? Is it the way we pay them? Is it the way we require we acquire them? Is it the way we treat them after that? And what they have come up with over and over again are these five attributes that we were quoting just a second before.
Duena:I don't know if you've noticed them or not. If you have, then we've wasted your time with this long explanation, which are, all of these things had in common psychological safety, meaning that they had the ability of being purely authentic and emotionally involved and, completely trusting with each other and have no fear of repercussions when they interacted. It's a very off the cuff definition of psychological safety. Then they had dependability, and that would be an interesting one to discuss to in my view, is we'll come to here. I don't believe that that necessarily involves quality, which is the point of discussion we had earlier.
Duena:And then lastly, these teams also had in common the fact that they felt a clear sense of structure and clarity, maybe the biggest, I keep saying, the biggest
Dave:Yeah. Exactly. What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?
Duena:The biggest pillar of of today's cultures is do people know at all times why they're doing it? Not even why they're doing it. Do people know at all times what is expected out of them, and is there a clear measurement of how this is going to be seen so that it's gonna be fair, it's gonna be validating, and it's gonna be
Dave:valuable? No.
Duena:Not necessarily a clear measurement. Clear understanding of what this value will be shown us. Right?
Dave:Right.
Duena:And so maybe this is why we need to get on it. But then the last two are impact and purpose. Finally, finish this, which is do I feel like I'm making an impact through my work? Do I see this very end result of the end mile of the customer that's satisfied or not, which I contend nobody does. And then lastly, do I have a purpose?
Duena:And this why has to be reinforced by, I would say, people who care about the team once a bloody week and not once ten years when we have a restructure. Anyways Yeah. Long story short
Dave:structure and clarity, definitely, team should be getting some feedback on the code they deployed over the past couple of months and its utilization in a production environment. Right?
Duena:So back to this. Quality should be part of dependability, or should it be part of the structure and clarity that quality is expected out of code? And and then
Dave:splitting hairs, really.
Duena:No. I don't think so. I think it's very important where you place it because if you decide that quality is only a an result of the other things put together, psychological safety, impact purpose, then it isn't part of them. But if it is a a a demonstratable part of a learning culture where it becomes part of of structure and where it becomes part of clarity, then you build it in the expectation of the culture, and then you have a much healthier structure, much less demand that because So
Dave:maybe this is a different definition than than. So maybe dependability, we're talking quality as code quality. But maybe in the structure and clarity, we're talking quality as it as it meets the definition of that.
Duena:No. I don't agree with that either. I think quality should include both, and it should include another deontological or ethical component of do I believe this to be done to the best of my abilities? So I think there's another dimension of of code signature or Well, that's the one
Dave:as well. Right? Perhaps drives right back to the another bit. It's done to the best of
Duena:Guess what, y'all? We didn't actually manage to realize when it died and why it died. It needed full restart. We are now in no more agreeable moods, and we'll need to do a part two to this because it ran way too long. And we can't even be sure that we'll know how to patch this very end a bit to our existing stuff.
Duena:So welcome to the shit show that is us trying to do podcasting and talking about these things. But before then, they've had a point he was trying to make earlier, and I think the Internet had cut it short. Do you wanna leave them with your tech and CTO perspective on this one?
Dave:No. No. Look. I think it's fair to say. So reading through the report, is some interesting stuff there.
Dave:Mainly, it's all just business. Right? I mean, there is some headline stuff. The developer velocity index benchmark. Sounds hideous.
Dave:The contribution analysis, it sounds even worse. But most of all, the talent capability score. I know, which we're gonna make everyone out of a 100 on all of their skill sets.
Duena:Lovely. What the the the skill set involved? Did you look into it? I would not help. No.
Duena:No.
Dave:No. They don't they don't even break it down.
Duena:You don't wanna go there?
Dave:They're in reference to MIT Sloan Management Review
Duena:Okay.
Dave:In March 2020, but there's no link, so I can't actually read that one.
Duena:Oh, I remember that one. It was something about how to improve business operations from MIT. Indeed, it it co published in 2020. It was written in 2018 or so. So practically, something that is just as relevant to today's business world is the Flintstones.
Dave:Yep. But I think Quebec really just sums this one
Duena:up. Right?
Dave:If you read through his first response to this. And, basically, it ties down to perverse incentives. Perverse incentives. Yes. So if you put a system in place, people are gonna gain the system.
Dave:Right? Very much the COBRA effect. We all know that story?
Duena:Yeah. I hope we do. But go ahead.
Dave:Okay. So COBRA effect in India at some point during the late last couple of centuries, whenever, the British government was really concerned about the number of deadly cobras there were inside Delhi. As you might do. Right? You know, sitting, getting burned, dying from snake bites.
Dave:It's
Duena:not good. Unpleasant.
Dave:So they offered a pat bounty for each cobra.
Duena:Every cobra.
Dave:Every cobra you bring me, I'll give you 2 rupees or whatever. I don't even know what the value was. But guess what happened?
Duena:A lot more cobras showed up in there. Let me guess.
Dave:Well, a lot more cobra farms
Duena:made up. One They took 1
Dave:rupee to raise a cobra to adult. 2 rupees, it was there for a month.
Duena:And why did the government of the UK not imagine that this would have happened? It's because humans don't have foresight. Let us let us be clear. Humans don't also have enough self awareness to be honest about what they're going through.
Dave:And, like, just unintended consequences everywhere.
Duena:But the the most dramatic unintended consequence that I keep crying about in this episode and in the next one and the one after is having to do with how we're going straight to the life of people. So whether or not sorry about that.
Dave:That was
Duena:a call. No.
Dave:That was an incoming call.
Duena:It was an incoming call. Are you sure it's all, like, the PPC or something? We'll have to leave you guys. We have to leave you anyways. Hopefully, we can patch this, and we'll see you for part two of what the
Dave:hell usable might come out of this. But, you know
Duena:We don't know. We are not very sure we can even get it up. But if we can we're not sure we can get it up. Please don't quote us. But if we can, we're gonna find ways to
Dave:Well, no. If we don't get it out now, then the next one may be even funnier because we'll do it tonight after a few titties.
Duena:Yeah. And we might be dead by that. We might have had some some horse's head not agreeing with our stance. Yeah.
Dave:Let me
Duena:let me just tell you about nobody gets fired for buying IBM, but they should.
Dave:They should.
Duena:Which is an article I wrote in Forbes ages ago. Didn't get me fired as compared to the other one. Right. Thank you for listening to us. We'll talk to you next week.
Dave:Thanks very much, everyone.
Duena:Bye.
Dave:Bye bye.
